http://textpattern.com/?v=4.5.7Long story; short pierhttp://www.longstoryshortpier.com/
God, hes left as on aur oun.Tue, 29 Aug 2017 20:56:30 GMTAltogether elsewhere, vast
So! Um. Hey. You look good, you look good! All things considered. —Oh, you know, screaming a lot, goggling aghast, scrambling to cobble together the paychecks I need to make it from one to the next, that sort of thing. Anyway, I’ve been doing some stuff over at the city. Maybe take a look, next time you’re around?]]>
http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/2017/08/29/a-pink-official-form
Tue, 29 Aug 2017 20:32:43 GMTkiptag:www.longstoryshortpier.com,2017-08-29:6ff979f64b2fcc6e50f81ff1c87d35cf/820153d19474183a0e4a00ac9652972cGo, move, shift
I needed this tonight, and thought you might as well, but I’ll warn you—the first time through’s the easiest, by far.]]>
http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/2016/07/21/somewhere-else
Fri, 22 Jul 2016 03:58:49 GMTkiptag:www.longstoryshortpier.com,2016-07-21:6ff979f64b2fcc6e50f81ff1c87d35cf/ab02fed98a45c67577639a8dbe094d79Ten years of roses
Pretty much what it says on the label: coming up on ten years ago, in August of 2006, I started posting City of Roses online with “Prolegomenon”; since then, I’ve written what the back of this envelope tells me is about 400,000 words.]]>
Pretty much what it says on the label: coming up on ten years ago, in August of 2006, I started posting City of Roses online with “Prolegomenon”; since then, I’ve written what the back of this envelope tells me is about 400,000 words. Two complete volumes, and just about half of a third; twenty-seven novelettes; one decade. —Those certainly are numbers.

The occasion ought to be marked in some fashion? I’m thinking of a reading or two, though no concrete steps have been taken yet to set something up—I’ve been head down writing the most recent chapter, you see. But also because I’d like to have a new edition of the paperbacks ready, or at least the first volume, with a tightened cover design, a sleekened interior, with some minor edits here and there to correct a smattering of typos, remove an infelicitous “goddamn” or two, smooth out some inconsistencies of usage, as perhaps the leaping capitalizations of his Grace, His Grace, his grace. Mostly, though, I’d like for these books to have a new distributor, one more salubrious to libraries, and independent bookstores, one freed from Amazon’s narrowing straits. And I don’t yet have a release date firmly pegged for this new edition: the designing, the proofing, the paperwork, each take time, and, well, my head has been down.

—Time, but also money: to buy a block of unentailed ISBNs, to set things up with a new print-on-demand shop, to secure test prints and ship review copies—more numbers.

Thus, Patreon. —Patreon is my choice of crowd-funding sites to help support this independent publishing endeavor, as have chosen so many other writers and cartoonists and filmmakers and historians and pornographers and musicians and suchlike. Mine’s set up so that amounts can be pledged on a monthly basis, and I make sure to post something for patrons at least once a month—cover reveals, raw images of possible covers under consideration (like the above), deleted scenes and alternate takes, and of course copies of each novelette, before they’re available anywhere else. And it’s been of incalculable assistance already, whether it’s covering a last-minute webhosting bill, or domain registration, or groceries for a week when other checks are late—more, and far more important, than beer money, and I’m endlessly grateful to each and every patron who’s already pitching in.

You might note that I’m only a few dollars short of the current goal, which is intended to support precisely the sort of nuts-and-bolts redesign I’d like to accomplish for this anniversary. What I’d ask is maybe consider a moment helping me reach it, and reach past it, and while I don’t have much beyond the listed rewards to support this particular pledge-drive, anyone who signs up in July or August at a level to receive paper copies of the ’zines and books will receive all five volume three ’zines thus far. (And also stammering gratitude, abashed blushes, toe-lines dragged in dust, etc. etc. —I really need to do something about my marketing department.)

Now: back to the various grindstones I’ve set before my nose! Further bulletins as events warrant.

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http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/2016/07/12/rosiversary
Tue, 12 Jul 2016 13:20:47 GMTkiptag:www.longstoryshortpier.com,2016-07-12:6ff979f64b2fcc6e50f81ff1c87d35cf/8830fa90624fe194a774d10061830bddI am, occasionally, quite mean
For whatever reason, I’ve been watching old episodes of Alias, a show I never got into when it was running, and while ordinarily I’d be game for anyone who said, hey, let’s mash up La Femme Nikita and Hudson Hawk, maybe see what happens, there’s something so pedestrian about how the show goes about showing how mad the writing seems to think it wants to be—but then the penny dropped: the thing about J.J. Abrams filmmaking (to pull a name from a hat) is how it’s the filmic equivalent of transparentprose: images, that get out of the way of the story—]]>
http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/2016/04/16/bete-transparente
Sat, 16 Apr 2016 04:57:28 GMTkiptag:www.longstoryshortpier.com,2016-04-16:6ff979f64b2fcc6e50f81ff1c87d35cf/e0d27bdafde025683892a4e726fb162dPellucid limpidity
The notion of “transparent” prose, to tug a loose thread, has always so bedeviled me, if only because the sheer folly of seeing one’s chosen medium as an impediment to be done away with has always struck me as, well, sheer folly.]]>
Wesley Osam’s undertaking a series of posts on the Novelization Style, which is a fine-enough name for a thing that thinks it has no name, that imagines because it sounds just like everything else around it can’t be heard, but that once you’ve finally seen it can’t be unseen, like the goddamn arrow in the FedEx logo, poking your eye on every commute, now. —The notion of “transparent” prose, to tug a loose thread, has always so bedeviled me, if only because the sheer folly of seeing one’s chosen medium as an impediment, to be done away with, has always struck me as, well, sheer folly: I’ve whittered on about it before, and it was the subject of perhaps my first-ever twitter rant, but Wesley’s digging in with grace and purpose; go, read. Myself, I just want to take up just a little bit of it, here—

In effect Novelization Style has no narrator—or, at least, the narrator, and the implied author, is neutral, impartial, and devoid of personality. No one is telling this story. It’s a camera, pointed at a set, with no one behind it.

So you don’t ask “Who is the narrator?” which means you also don’t ask questions like “Why is this narrator telling this story? Why did they make these decisions about the plot, or the characters? What do they want me to think about all this, and do I agree?” The story feels less like something someone made, and more like something that just sort of happened. This does not exactly encourage you to think about what you’re reading. When I read a book like Leviathan’s Wake it’s a struggle to actively engage with the book instead of… well, just sort of skim along the surface with it.

This is where the writing gets tricky, because this disengagement is an accidental side effect. But it’s going to sound a bit like I’m accusing writers of writing this way to discourage questions about what they write. This is not even remotely any writer’s goal. I thought I should pause to explicitly note that, to forestall confusion.

Because maybe, if we’re reading something like those old space operas with no place for women, reading thoughtlessly reinforces ideas we’d be better off questioning. A few years ago, because it seemed popular at the time, I gave Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy a chance. What I remember is that the pro-democracy, reformist male lead gained some political power and quickly became a dictatorial tinpot general because, gosh, going all Pinochet just worked better. The books seemed barely aware they were making a political argument.

A book that raises such specters needs to deal with them; this one does not. In her review of the musical Urinetown Erin Horáková, paraphrasing and expanding on something I once glibly tweeted, analyzes the ways in which a work of art, by presenting a political critique that stops just short of where it needs to, or goes awry at just the right (wrong) moments, can present the appealing appearance of opposition while in effect serving to prop up the system it appears to oppose.

I don’t think the show means to so thoroughly betray its political content and its Brechtian form. It’s not evil; it’s just stupid. In trying to “blow your mind” with this final turn and add another layer of cynicism, Urinetown manages to undo every scrap of work it’s done thus far. Then it has the nerve to sneer that:

Little Sally: I don’t think too many people are going to come see this musical, Officer Lockstock. Lockstock: Why do you say that, Little Sally? Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?

It’s rich to say that people won’t hear this story and change, when the musical itself has pretended to be a revolutionary text and then said change is too dangerous, the workings of power too mysterious and wise (however corrupt), and that thus the wisest thing one can do is nothing. This is like that shitty Doctor Who episode “Stolen Earth,” where Davros tells the Tenth Doctor that his problem, as a character, is that he “makes people killers!!” Now that character, at this point in the run, had a score of serious issues, and none of them were that? So the show burns a straw man and tells itself and its audience that it’s gotten to the heart of the matter, that it’s done its repentance. Again, the fail-condition of criticism is reification. In misdefining a problem and/or not offering possible ways to fix a problem while dwelling on that problem in your art, you can just reinforce said problem. Radicalism has issues and is capable of failing itself and those it advocates for, but not quite in the boring, simplistic way depicted herein. Rather than attacking the culture of overweening corporate power and its control over our lives and how that control is redefining our ideas of privacy, the body, etc. (which would be fairly apropos right about now), suddenly Urinetown is talking about vague ideas of personal responsibility, but not in a tangible, useful way. Shit, was the last act written by a Republican?

In McCurry’s portraits, the subject looks directly at the camera, wide-eyed and usually marked by some peculiar­ity, like pale irises, face paint or a snake around the neck. And when he shoots a wider scene, the result feels like a certain ideal of photography: the rule of thirds, a neat counterpoise of foreground and background and an obvious point of primary interest, placed just so. Here’s an old-timer with a dyed beard. Here’s a doe-eyed child in a head scarf. The pictures are staged or shot to look as if they were. They are astonishingly boring.

Boring, but also extremely popular: McCurry’s photographs adorn calendars and books, and command vertiginous prices at auction. He has more than a million followers on Instagram. This popularity does not come about merely because of the technical finesse of his pictures. The photographs in “India,” all taken in the last 40 years, are popular in part because they evoke an earlier time in Indian history, as well as old ideas of what photographs of Indians should look like, what the accouterments of their lives should be: umbrellas, looms, sewing machines; not laptops, wireless printers, escalators. In a single photograph, taken in Agra in 1983, the Taj Mahal is in the background, a steam train is in the foreground and two men ride in front of the engine, one of them crouched, white-bearded and wearing a white cap, the other in a loosefitting brown uniform and a red turban. The men are real, of course, but they have also been chosen for how well they work as types.

Clear? (—“It strikes me that one of the similarities between great fiction and great marketing copy is the ability to sell the content of whatever it is you’re writing about,” writes RandyC, extolling the importance of transparency in prose, but “Weaker photography delivers a quick message—sweetness, pathos, humor—but fails to do more,” writes Cole. —Which is true not just of photography.)

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http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/2016/04/02/always-clarity
Sun, 03 Apr 2016 02:34:41 GMTkiptag:www.longstoryshortpier.com,2016-04-02:6ff979f64b2fcc6e50f81ff1c87d35cf/b2e6fd236dbb54ccd9d2bb08c6ad3d94Wurstfabrik
How a tweet gets made.]]>
So I was setting up to fold the week’s laundry in the living room, and I was looking through the DVDs for something to watch, mostly because the last working Apple remote has gone walkabout, and maybe it’s because the Wachowskis have been in the news lately or maybe it’s because it’s one of the best films of the aughts, a pinnacle of cinematic achievement, but anyway I grabbed Speed Racer.

I mean, the opening sixteen minutes or so alone, a thrilling overture that blithely delivers a payload of unthinkably dense exposition—here is our protagonist, here is his backstory, here his family, his brother who went before him, here’s how the sci-fi cars work, and also all the tricks we’ll be using to tell the story, pay just enough attention to clock our moves, the time-shifts, the colors, the floating talking heads of sports commentators, as-you-know-Bobbing their polyphonic takes on the various narrative threads—it’s a real piece of Gesamtkunstwerk, and you can’t help but feel a little taken aback when the movie downshifts into the first act of its actual, y’know, story (though the disappointment is anticipated, cushioned, soon enough wiped away).

So anyway the story’s unspooling, and I’ve folded a bunch (amazing, the laundry a seven-year-old can run through), and here comes the quiet beat when Ben Burns comes to see Speed Racer in the locker room, after Speed’s DNF’d the Fuji Helexicon, and you realize, damn, they just ran a whole sequence in a conditional tense—anyway, it’s quiet, as I said, and contemplative, we’re at what you might call the hinge between the first act, and the second, which I wouldn’t, but there’s Ben Burns, whom the story’s already told us is our Fisher King, who’d lost his soul by letting them let him win a race, the race, the Grand Prix, only to discover that all he can do after is sit outside the castle, and cast sports—but here he is, come to speak to our protagonist, Speed, and what does he say?

Nice race. Haven’t seen moves like that in a long time.

And, I mean, Speed Racer is technicolorly, obviously a fantasy in any of a number of senses, but I’m speaking strictly Cluthian, for the moment: we see that the world (of racing) has gone wrong; that (its) honorable ideals have been thinned (by corporate corruption, and greed); our protagonist is then recognized (as the racer who can win in spite of it all); and thus the world returns (with all those flashbulbs, and a bottle of cold milk, and a kiss).

So you might think Ben Burns says “Haven’t seen moves like that in a long time” (and not, “Damn, I’ve never seen moves like that before”) because he’s thinking of Speed’s brother, Rex, or of his old rival, Stickleton, or even of himself, and it could be any one of those, or all of them at once, or none, but the real reason why he says that is because Speed must be recognized—and to be recognized, one must’ve been seen before. Maybe not in a long time. But now, again.

(And but one can argue nor would I stop them that the real recognition comes later, at what I’d never refer to as the hinge between acts two, and three, when Speed’s about to storm out of the Racer household in a rage, in an echo of Rex’s storming earlier, much earlier, when Pops sits Speed down to tell him what he didn’t tell Rex, what he wishes he’d told Rex, what might’ve kept Rex from dying, as it were, but sequences can multitask, and I have always read this scene as a fantasy of what a parent might sit down to tell a child who’s somehow, somewhich coming out, a parent who’s come to see how wrongly, maybe, they’d treated a child who came out before, a parent who’s life’s been thinned by the regret of that loss, who’s recognized in the second child a second chance, and oh, the return—)

Anyway. (Did I say that already?) —That, all that, or some approximation of that, was part of what was running through my mind when I got up from where I was sitting, and paused the DVD, and stepped, carefully, over all the folded laundry around and about to the keyboard, and after a moment’s thought, typed this:

We've not seen this in a long time. —fantasy
We've never seen this before. —sf
We're not gonna see this again. —horror

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http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/2016/03/15/behind-the-music
Tue, 15 Mar 2016 06:16:24 GMTkiptag:www.longstoryshortpier.com,2016-03-15:6ff979f64b2fcc6e50f81ff1c87d35cf/52d619b501620fdc5ff7e94fdf4c02f6Madeleine nabobs
I’m on a podcast!]]>
I’m told that professionals, when recording on the road, in a hotel room, away from the studio, will climb into bed and pull a blanket up over themselves, to cut down on ambient noise, I suppose; but I didn’t hear that until after, which is maybe why the audio’s not so great on my end—well, that, and my habit of speakingquiterapidlytillthemomentIsuddenly, uh—

—pause. And the swerve. —But! Jonah Sutton-Morse, proprietor of Cabbages & Kings, invited me over (in part, I believe, based on this old post) to talk about reading, and genre, and reading genre to our kids, and it was a blast: he’s a gracious and a generous host, and he keeps it moving in his finished pieces, and somehow even focussed—despite the material I gave him to work with!

So go, have a listen. —Jonah assembled a slideshow of book covers, a partial list of the titles we discussed, and it skews young, which is to be expected given our focus and purpose, but there’s another skew I wanted to note, here, at least: it’s rather almost entirely pale. —And that’s understandable, I suppose, given our purpose and our focus, and who I was and what I read when I was young, but the very fact I’m saying it’s understandable is telling enough, isn’t it? Or the itch I feel to soothingly point out that it’s a list of things I have read, not a list of recommendations to read, though I don’t not recommend them, or not all of them, anyway, and it is what it was, which is awkward, which it should be, which is useless, which leaves me, what?

(There are moves I could make. Other lists to itemize. But.)

—A footnote, though: one of the last books we talk about was one of the first that ever made an impression on me, in the way that books can, even though I only ever saw a school library copy, and then not ever again for years afterward, forgetting the title, the author, the illustrator, the names of the characters, most of the plot, but not—that thing? Whatever it is, that’s useful to us in a story, when all the rest is worn away? —Once Taran was old enough, I took those bones of a memory and went looking for the book, which it turns out is something the internet’s pretty good at.

Something Queer is Going On. How (further) disappointed I am in myself, that I might’ve forgotten a title like that! —There was something of a disorienting madeleine-moment, opening the envelope, seeing a lost memory restored and reified with one rather swell foop of that vanilla-ish old-book smell, but more dizzying was opening up those worn boards (the front cover has since fallen off, and been taped) and reading it aloud, feeling the ghosts of the word-memories under what I was hearing my mouth speak, but above all having the two main characters restored: Jill, whose mother is “O.K.”, and Gwen, with her habit of tapping her braces when she’s thinking, and their friendship, which—and there’s nothing that revolutionary about it, it’s not like this was the only or first time it’d ever been done, but still: how shiveringly odd to hold in my hands the first time I’d ever so long ago met the archetypes I’d later lean on, when I started to write about Ysabel, and Jo.